November 12, 2014 08:35 AM UTC

That's Right America, You Voted For The Ryan Plan!

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• by: Colorado Pols

The New York Times' Jonathan Weisman reports:

Next year, House Republicans will try again to transform Medicare and Medicaid, repeal the Affordable Care Act, shrink domestic spending and substantially cut the highest tax rates through the budget process. Then they will leave it to the new Senate Republican majority to decide how far to press the party’s small-government vision, senior House aides said this week.

House Republican officials said the first budget blueprint of the 114th Congress will not stray far from the plans drafted by Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin and the departing Budget Committee chairman. Those plans, passed along party lines three times since Republicans took control of the House in 2011, were never going anywhere with the Senate in Democratic hands.

With this month’s Republican sweep in the midterm elections, the stakes have changed.

“They’re firing with real budget bullets,” said Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee. “Real people will get hurt.”

The so-called "Ryan Plan" budgets proposed by the Republican U.S. House majority since 2011 have been quite damaging to that party's electoral prospects, playing a significant role in the 2012 loss of the Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan presidential ticket. The Ryan budget's huge tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, combined with proposed cuts to popular federal programs across the board–and especially the privatization of Medicare for future enrollees–poll abysmally, and have given Democrats vital evidence to support their case that Republicans don't care about the middle class.

At least that's what happened in 2012. In 2014, a very different midterm electorate handed control of the U.S. Senate to the same Republican Party that gave America the Ryan Plan budgets–including Colorado's own Sen.-elect Cory Gardner:

The last time the Ryan budget faced a vote in the Senate, in 2013, five Republicans voted against it: Ms. Collins; Dean Heller, a moderate-leaning Nevadan; Mike Lee of Utah; Rand Paul of Kentucky; and Ted Cruz of Texas, who saw the plan as too timid. It failed on an advisory vote, 40 to 59.

On the other hand, four Republican newcomers to the Senate — Representatives Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Steve Daines of Montana, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Cory Gardner of Colorado — are already on the record supporting the Ryan approach, with a fifth, Representative Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, in a runoff for the last outstanding Senate seat.

Despite the results of last week's midterm elections, we've seen no polling to indicate that the Ryan budget's cuts are any more popular now than they were two years ago. Just like the period between 2010 and the 2012 presidential elections, the gap between the midterm electorate's strident conservatism and the more representative cross-section of America that turns out in presidential years could be setting the GOP up for another failure in 2016. Republicans can't overcome a presidential veto of an unacceptable budget, which the GOP-controlled Senate may use reconciliation to pass without 60 votes: but they can dig themselves a much deeper hole with the voting public. And the results of this election may well have given Republicans the false sense of political security they need to keep digging.

What happens next? One way or another, Cory Gardner is going to help answer that question.